kristin hersh

The guitar that love built will be in my hands in a few days. It’s the end of the week as we know it and everything’s different now.

Last month, I did a mini-tour of the southwest with Robert Fisher from the Willard Grant Conspiracy, a normal tour: club dates, club promoters, club crowds. Fine, fine and fine again, nothing out of the ordinary, really. The only problem was that I was playing these old Shady Circle songs; songs written in houses for friends, family and interested onlookers. In clubs, hey come off as art pieces: interesting old paintings, but nothing a twenty-first century individual would ever think to crawl into.

Billy and I flew around the country, thinking, talking, then scooped up the kids and shoved ‘em back into the truck, still thinking and talking, Shady Circle songs in our ears. We gazed off into the distance, wondering what the New Old World’ll be like, when songs written in houses for friends, family and interested onlookers can be played in houses for friends, family and interested onlookers.

Crackpot Theory meets Wild Hare: Billy books Shady Circle house shows with fan promoters on the drive back to California. Kids, dogs, snakes, guitars, amps, groceries, suitcases and schoolbooks tumbling out of the truck and into the loving embrace of smart people, backyards, laughter and potluck freakin’ dinners! Allow me to repeat: everything’s different now.

Here’s why:

1. All real songs are written in houses (and garages and motels and the back seats of cars) for friends, family and interested onlookers. This is music to crawl into. Music played just for commerce is, in my snooty opinion, not real music. If we have to go back in musical time to before there was a music industry in order to learn this lesson, then that’s what we should do, ’cause it’s an important one.
2. Normal people like music. Not just people who look like the rock bands they listen to; all kinds of people are moved by sound. They don’t need big corporations to tell them what music they like and they also don’t need to jeopardize tomorrow’s work day to drink expensive-cheap beer in the middle of the night in a rock club if that isn’t their thing. They still like music.
3. People are giving. When they aren’t being taken advantage of, they know it. They deserve respect and when they get it, they share: ideas, jokes, opinions, money, food, stories, music and beer.

At Michelle’s house concert, like all the house concerts, I laughed and talked through my set and everyone else in the room laughed and talked with me. We were together in the room, not separated by a wall of performer vs. audience. Afterwards, I watched in envy as bandmates scheduled rehearsals with each other. It seemed like everyone there was in a band with everyone else who was there.

I told them I’d give anything to be able to play with one of my bands on a Tuesday night in a basement (or anywhere, for that matter). “Why can’t you play with your bands?” Michelle’s drummer asked.

“Well…because…of the music business,” I answered, well aware of how stupid that sounds.

I bought into the conventional music business a long time ago. Shame on me. Michelle’s world is the New Old World (bring it on!). Someday soon, there will be such a thing as a musician who does not suck and does not starve. Imagine: local bands again. Playing in one’s own city for friends, family and interested onlookers. No more begging, for tours, radio, publicity, T.V. and movie placement, etc. No more rich rock stars, just passing the hat and working hard to support your music habit. There is no shame in that, but there should be shame associated with playing lousy music just to make money and get famous. That’s failure.

I had given up on ever seeing the guitar I asked Collings to build for me almost 3 years ago, before money got really tight.  Collings builds their beautiful guitars to my specifications. Bill Collings watched me play and chose the wood, while I chose the bodyshape.  It was gonna be perfect. My old Collings C-10, the reason I ever had a solo acoustic career, was beaten to shit, barely playable any longer; I really needed a new guitar. But I simply couldn’t take food out of the kids’ mouths to buy a guitar, even if it was built for me.

The people at Collings sympathized and apologized for having to replace the “KH” headstock with a generic one in order to sell it to someone else. Billy was heartbroken, having spent the last few Christmases and birthdays struggling to find a way to surprise me with the guitar, but ultimately giving up.

Friday morning, out of desperation, we decided to share our frustration with this community. We were overwhelmed by the response we got. Billy received (and answered!) almost 600 emails from people wanting to help me buy the guitar. Hundreds of contributions came into “The Hat”, my online tip-jar, mostly small ones between one and five dollars, sometimes ridiculously generous ones. “The Hat” runneth over. By Friday afternoon, we had enough to buy the guitar. We laughed and cried, awe-struck, and begged people to stop contributing.

When the guys at Collings heard what happened, they shared our shock and glee, blown away that any musician could have such a loving following. “They’re buying it for you?” Today, they’re happily boxing up and shipping off my beautiful New Old Guitar.

You people continue to amaze me.

A special “Thank you” to the first Shady Circle house concert promoters: Echo (Brooklyn, NY), Tine (Franklin, MA), Michele (Buffalo, NY) and Tom (Lee’s Summit, MO)

Me, playing “Deep Wilson”, fireside, in Tom’s Backyard.

A few months back, Billy started hankering for another Throwing Music experiment in keeping with his “Works In Progress” mp3 subscription series of 1998 (we’ve been selling mp3s for 10 years now!?!), which he followed with the on-line only release of “Murder, Misery and Then Goodnight” later that same year, and the 50FootWave “Free Music” name-your-own-price experiment which resulted in more than 2 million Ep downloads in 2005 (yeah, 3 years prior to you-know-who “inventing” the idea) . He likes to get music directly into the hands of listeners whenever possible.

This time, the Great Idea Inside Billy’s Head was this:

“We’ll offer people in our web community the chance to buy CD-R’s of Kristin playing 10 songs of their choice. They’ll pick the 10 songs from a menu of 200 — no guesswork on our part as to what anyone wants to hear — they’ll tell us. We’ll burn the CD’s ourselves and Kris can personalize and sign them: 10-4 (your name here).

We’ll charge $50 for this CD, ensuring that only a few people will partake initially. But if they like it, word’ll spread.”

Wicked, I thought. I never know what people want to hear. Some seem to only like old Throwing Muses songs, some only like the most recent release, some people only like Sunny Border Blue, some people want unreleased material, some like me to scream real loud, some like me to whisper, some just like Your Ghost over and over and over again. Now the set list can be someone else’s fault decision. And when ThrowingMusic webinatrix Tine says, “I want one!” I know it’s a good idea.

We sold 100 in record time (under 20 minutes). Of course.

“A hundred?” I asked.

“A hundred,” answered Billy.

“Literally a hundred?” I asked, hoping he was kidding.

“Get to work, he replied.

As it turns out, 200 songs is a lot. And my songs are not the easiest to play. For two months, I sat with my iPod, marveling at the disgusting complexity of a Throwing Muses song, wondering who the hell wrote all these “Kristin Hersh” solo songs, filling notebooks with lyrics, chords and time signature notations, asking questions like, is a piano instrumental even a song?

Creating an acoustic version for each song and then getting it performance-ready was like preparing for ten tours at once. I tried shifting my focus to the first few orders. Now I know what songs people want to hear: generally speaking, songs that I would never, ever choose to play live. Which sort of makes sense.

When I finally felt that I was able to tackle the first few orders, my gear wasn’t. It buzzed and clicked and ultimately choked. I wondered if I should just concede defeat and offer refunds.

Then I had an idea: offer an upgrade. I bought time at Stable Sound and started over, recording clear but still raw versions of all the songs people had asked to hear. I built personalized 10 song sets out of this session, dedicating each 10-4 to the special boy or girl who’d ordered it.

When we happily told folks that some high-quality 10-4’s would be on their way soon, they expressed great disappointment. Initially, we were taken aback; then I came to appreciate what it was they were after.  They wanted truth in real-time.  Warts and all. And they wanted it played just for them: a musical prayer. I can get behind musical prayer. Way.

So, months behind schedule, I started over again and we offered refunds in case some people didn’t want to wait. No one asked for a refund.

It takes me about an hour to learn each song on a 10-4 and get it up to speed, then maybe another hour to  record. Billy lies on the floor and listens, we appreciate each song as it goes by and reminisce about the time it was written, recorded or toured. We laugh a lot, cried once or twice. We get through 1 or 2 orders on a good day.

It’s been a real nightmare learning experience - like all great ideas. I keep telling Billy that he thinks I can do anything, when really, the opposite is true: I can’t do anything. But we’ve come to love diving headfirst into this ocean of songs and swimming around.

Note: The ThrowingMusic Store is offering some of the songs I recorded live to tape at Stable Sound in a series of 5 volumes called “10-4-All”. Here’s an mp3 of one of them, “Cathedral Heat”. And in case you’re interested, here’s an outtake from an actual 10-4 recording, “Mexican Women”.

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Thank you Mo Herms and Little Radio for doing good things and playing good music. Here’s Monday’s session.

“It’s okay to be scared…

…how are you gonna give them your heart if you don’t have one?” - Betty Hutton

mp3 - Cartoons - live to tape

Only a couple of generations ago, we the people sang the songs and told the stories and generated our culture from the bottom up. But now, more and more of our culture is spoon-fed to us top-down by corporations, TV networks and ad agencies. We must reclaim our culture. Start telling our own stories again. Singing our own songs. Producing our own meaning. Creating our own cool. — Adbusters

• • • • •

“So what would happen to god if all the televangelists disappeared?” we asked ourselves in the cereal aisle at Trader Joe’s, music and commerce having mixed us up pretty bad in the last year. Surely, people’ll start looking for a better passport to the spirit world than what the bloated corporate corpse** offered. Just about anything’d be better than continuing to throw money at cartoon characters.

Billy picked up a box of raisin bran and read the ingredients.

“Or else we’re all so messed up by the business of selling music that we don’t know what to look for anymore. ”

I picked up my own box of cereal to read, then put it back.

“But music just is.”

Billy tossed the raisin bran into the cart and started walking slowly down the aisle. “Most people don’t think that. Most people think music is the recording industry, just like they think religion is god.” We paused in produce to let the misters spritz us (it was a hot day). “You never belonged in the recording industry anyway; you’re a musician.” He held up a loaf of bread. “Do we need bread?”

“I’ll bake some.”

“No you won’t.”

“Then we need bread,” I said. “But good music matters.”

He thought. “To a select few, maybe. Lots of people don’t know the difference.” We lingered in frozen foods (hot day). “But it doesn’t matter who hears the music,” he said. “If it’s played at all, we win.”

• • • • •

** warner brothers rejected this video when my band, throwing muses, delivered it. they said i didn’t look pretty enough.

…it allows for ideas and collaborations like this:

A time-lapse of a painting by Carmen Benske, set to my song “Torque”.

Sometimes I forget where we went this time.

Waking up, I take stock: Billy’s big shoulders are partially obscured by a matching set of tiny tan ones. Bodhi must have slipped into bed with us sometime in the night. He can do this because our bed is a mattress on the floor. So we must be broke again.

Through a glass door is a palm tree…did we go to Florida? Texas? Australia? The Mojave Desert suddenly comes into sharp focus and I am briefly disappointed. The Mojave Desert is romantic, but I like Florida, Texas and Australia. Some other time maybe.

This takes about four seconds. By the fifth second, I remember that we’re broke because the bloated monster Recording Industry finally rolled over and died. Hopefully it’ll take some of its crap with it, free up some ear space for real music.

A real musician is someone who has no choice but to play music, whether or not it’s gonna make money or win friends. Or be heard at all. A real musician could be anyone; sometimes they’re in the music business, but they’re hardly ever rock stars.

So our habitat’s been paved over. The low-hanging fruit on which we lived grew on some of the first branches of the music business to fall. But the bloated monster should die. It was an ugly monster.

And we’ve always lived hard, on the move, looking for work. Not by choice, necessarily, but we’ve found that it keeps us…useful. And happy.

Happy because we like raising our own kids. Kids untainted by chemicals and brainwashing. And happy because we like to play our own music. Music unsullied by greed. Beautiful, smart, healthy children and beautiful, smart, healthy, music.

Bodhi wakes up and smiles.

mp3 - “Half Blast” - live in my bedroom